We are in a recession

It's official. The Bush recession began in December 2007. It's funny how these things get "called" retrospectively. There was a lot of debate in the early part of this year about whether we were in a recession or not. I remember a few commenters on Movin' Meat vehemently arguing that it was not a recession, and that the only definition of a recession is two quarters of negative GDP. By that definition, we are not there yet, though I think we were negative in Q3 by the tiniest of margins, and Q4 will surely be negative.

I wasn't aware of the NBER before today, and don't know squat about them or their methodology. But they made front page at CNN, NYT and WaPo, so I'll assume that this is credible.

The million-dollar question (or, more aptly, trillion-dollar question) is how long and deep the recession will be. I'm guessing the next six months are going to be pretty bleak.